Stearns concedes in primary

It’s all over for Rep. Cliff Stearns in Florida’s Republican primary, which delivered a stunning upset victory to a veterinarian who has never held elected office.

Stearns conceded the race to political novice Ted Yoho on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported. The outcome in Tuesday’s election was an unexpected fall from power for Stearns, who had used his chairmanship of a key House Energy and Commerce subcommittee to put the White House on the hot seat over Solyndra and help trigger this year's Komen-Planned Parenthood blow-up.

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Yoho, leading by 829 votes out of 63,690 counted with all precincts reporting, didn't wait to celebrate victory Tuesday night.

"I'm going to thank God,” the self-proclaimed “Christian and conservative Republican” told the Times. “I'm going to do a Tebow right here.”

As of early Wednesday morning, it was still possible that still-to-be-counted provisional ballots and overseas absentee ballots could eat into Yoho's lead, or even reverse the outcome. For now, though, Yoho's margin is 1.3 percent, outside the 0.5-percent margin that Florida law sets for an automatic recount.

Yoho had 34.4 percent of the vote to Stearns's 33.1 percent in a four-candidate field.

Still, the outcome was an unexpected rebuke for Stearns, an incumbent whose $2.1 million campaign war chest far outweighed Yoho's $129,500 as of late July — and who, as recently as March, appeared to be a rising Republican rock star.

As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight subpanel, Stearns was in charge of an aggressive investigation of Solyndra that had put the Obama administration's clean-energy programs on trial.

Stearns was also behind an investigation of Planned Parenthood that Susan G. Komen for the Cure cited as its justification for cutting off cancer-screening grant money to the women’s health organization. Komen reversed itself amid a nationwide outcry, but it lost public support and has had much turnover since then among its top leadership.

The Planned Parenthood probe heightened Stearns's national profile for a time, especially among social conservatives. But his investigation — into whether Planned Parenthood was improperly using federal funds for abortions, which it denied — soon faded from the headlines.